Team work key for SuperSport
Jeremy Brockie was very honest in his assessment of why SuperSport United have struggled this season, which led to the sacking of coach Gordon Igesund.
|||Jeremy Brockie was very honest in his assessment of why SuperSport United have struggled this season, which led to the sacking of coach Gordon Igesund who was replaced by Stuart Baxter.
“You can have as much quality and talent in the squad as you want but if you’ve got no direction or you aren’t pulling together as a team and you’re going out there as individuals on the day then positive results are not going to come,” Brockie said. “That’s what the coach is bringing to us. He is tactically setting us up a lot better.”
The 1-0 victory Matsatsantsa a Pitori scraped from Moroka Swallows at Dobsonville Stadium on Tuesday showed just how deep the club’s problems are. When they’re struggling, they retreat to playing more as individuals than as a team. That’s why the club has lacked spark which has seen them languish in 11th place despite assembling a formidable squad. Their body language shows how much they’re desperate to get this season over with so that they can start planning for next season.
“I understand the thought, I am trying to not let that creep into my head because I have a job to do now with the players that I’ve got and I don’t want to be thinking about players that are coming in or will be departing,” Baxter said.
“I want to put down as much groundwork as I can. A bit of the groundwork for SuperSport is that they have had a season where they think that they can do better. The table and the points tally doesn’t lie. It reflects the way you have played.
“One of the reasons (for that) is I think that when things don’t go perfectly, they have a little bit of a mental panic and they revert to playing individually. You can’t be a top team when you only play individually. You have to have a structure, know what to do as a good teammate and then your individual flair will come through and help the team. If you keep playing as an individual, it all splinters and you lose contact with each other. That’s one of the things that have gone wrong this season.”
Baxter’s attempts to mend that isn’t helped by games coming in quickly at the back of each other. But there have been glimpses of a good side. They momentarily showed that in defeats to Mamelodi Sundowns and Kaizer Chiefs. The problem is that they have done that only in moments. That will be the mentor’s biggest challenge in their eight remaining matches in the Absa Premiership as well as the Nedbank Cup where they advanced to the last 16 after beating the Dube Birds.
Matsatsantsa will know their opponents this afternoon as Baxter looks to win this tournament for the second time after guiding Kaizer Chiefs to glory in 2014. One of the things he has done at the club is to move Jeremy Brockie from playing as the leading forward to a ‘shadow striker’ just like he did Bernard Parker at Chiefs.
“Brockie is dangerous from that No 10 position because he is more difficult to mark,” Baxter said. “If he is standing on the shoulders of defenders, he doesn’t have the blistering pace to go behind them so he has to use his intelligence. Brockie will be the player for us for the rest of the reason.” - The Star